Netflix beats expectations yet again outstripping its own growth estimates for Q3

Despite a recent price hike in subscription rates, Netflix is steadily growing both in terms of revenues and subscribers.

Beating Wall Street’s expectations, Netflix added 5.3 million new subscribers this quarter, with 850,000 coming in the US and 4.45 million coming from international markets. “We continued to benefit from a strong appetite for our original series and films, as well as the adoption of internet entertainment across the world,” the company reported.

Netflix has been making aggressive push into original programming with “Stranger Things” and “The Crown” and the bet seems to be paying off. The company now says it plans to spend as much as $8 billion on content next year — up from an earlier estimate of $7 billion — far outstripping the investments expected from rivals Hulu, Amazon and HBO.

“Our investment in Netflix originals is over a quarter of our total P&L content budget in 2017 and will continue to grow. With $17 billion in content commitments over the next several years and a growing library of owned content ($2.5 billion net book value at the end of the quarter), we remain quite comfortable with our ability to please our members around the world. We’ll spend $7 billion to 8 billion on content (on a P&L basis) in 2018,” the company said in its earnings release.

Netflix reported net income of $129.6 million, or 29 cents per share, up from income of $51.5 million, or 12 cents per share during the same quarter a year ago. Revenue increased 30 percent to $2.99 billion.

The company said it now has $17 billion in streaming-content obligations, a measure of current and future costs for content acquisition, licensing and production, an increase from $14.4 billion in the same quarter last year. Shares of Netflix have gained nearly 64 percent in the year to date giving the company a market value of about $87.5 billion.